Why the Intel Agencies Want to Track Your Every Transaction and Throw Roger Ver in Jail for Life
47:48 Share

Hey, aren't you that PBM? Middleman. At your service, doctor. Don't you get rebates that save money on medicines? Oh, PBMs like me get big rebates. So why do patients tell me they're worried about their costs? No one says we have to share the savings with patients. Congress should make sure medicine savings go directly to patients, not middlemen. Visit prma.org slash middlemen to learn more. Paid for by Pharma.

Roger, thanks a lot for joining us. So here's how I understood your story. This is what I read. You are being extradited from Spain, an ally in Western Europe, a NATO country, to the United States by the U.S. Justice Department to face life in prison, 109 years, for tax evasion. You're not a U.S. citizen. The period that you're being charged with evading American taxes, you are not a U.S. citizen. And you're not a U.S. citizen.

And so whenever I see a story that says the U.S. government is extraditing somebody for tax evasion to put him in prison for 109 years, my first thought is maybe it's not really about the taxes. Maybe there's something more to this story. Could there be another reason the U.S. government is angry at you and wants to put you in prison for the rest of your life? Yeah, to be honest, I think they're not really angry about taxes at all. I think they're just angry about my lack of obedience and lack of, you know, kissing their ring.

I was the first person in the entire world to start investing in the Bitcoin ecosystem and investing in businesses that made it easy for people to use Bitcoin as money and as cash for people all over the world. And I was promoting it since 2011 as, hey, stop using the US dollar, stop using euros, stop using yen, start using Bitcoin. We have an alternative in which each individual anywhere on the planet can be in charge of their own money completely without needing permission from any politician or any government anywhere in the world.

And when you're a government that loves controlling people through the control of the money supply, that's very, very threatening to their control of the world. So, of course, they didn't like that at all. And I knew that this sort of thing was dangerous, and I thought the safest path for me would be to not be a U.S. citizen. So in 2014, I renounced my U.S. citizenship and became a citizen of the world, effectively. But my new nationality is St. Kitts, which is a wonderful little island in the Caribbean.

And I thought that that would be safe for me and I could promote Bitcoin from there and obey. Even though I may disagree with plenty of laws, I do my best to obey them because I know when you're in...

advocating for things that change the world. Governments don't like that and they can come after you. So I told all my tax attorneys and everybody else, we have to do everything perfect so that there's no room for the US government to give me a hard time about any of this. And more than a decade after I had already renounced my US citizenship, and just a couple of weeks after I published a book on the hijacking of Bitcoin, how it no longer works as peer-to-peer cash for the world, and it's been morphed into something that is just a digital asset that people are speculating on the price on rather than something that can come

with the US dollar and the euro and the yen for useless currency around the world. Suddenly, right after my book gets published, that exposes how people claiming to work for intelligence agencies hijack Bitcoin to do that. Suddenly, I get arrested and tossed in jail in Spain and trying to be extradited to face more than 100 years in prison. I'm 45 today. I think my odds of a

being alive with conventional technology in 109 years from now aren't looking too good. So effectively to die in prison is what they want because they're so upset about the things I've been saying and the way I've been promoting cryptocurrency around the world. As the founder of Bitcoin.com, co-founder of XRP and Blockchain.com and a bunch of other companies, I literally seeded the entire first generation of cryptocurrency companies. And so they're furious at me for trying to have something that can compete with the US dollar as the world's medium of exchange and currency.

Now, I should just add an editorial comment. I mean, I am an American citizen and will remain one, I hope. So I'm not against the U.S. dollar in principle. It's that the mismanagement of the U.S. dollar, I think, by the people in charge of it, the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve, has made it kind of a sketchy proposition long term. It's like their mismanagement has forced people to think about alternatives.

And one of the most promising alternatives was Bitcoin. And it was, I remember very well since I'm 55, when it first appeared, the idea was this is a way for people to conduct business, to buy goods and services without being controlled, to have, as you said, control over their own money, autonomy. And it has become instead this asset class.

And I'm very interested in how exactly that happened. And so if you wouldn't mind explaining the thesis of your book, what you saw, how that happened, you say subterfuge by the intel agencies played a role. I'll stop talking and let you explain what you saw.

Yeah, I think to get started on that, we'll have to back up more than 25 years ago. So when I was a very young man, I ran for political office as a libertarian in California and called for lower taxes, less government in every area and everywhere. And this was in the year 2000. And for those of us that are old enough to remember, in the late 1990s, there was an incident in Waco, Texas, where there was a religious group there with a bunch of adults, but a bunch of kids, some of them three, four, five years old, like little kids.

And even if the parents were religious nuts, the ATF and FBI literally burnt to death everybody in their home there and then posed for photos on top of the corpses of little kids.

And that sort of thing is not okay. And the FBI and ATF are a bunch of murderers for murdering kids. And even if the parents are doing something illegal, you don't murder the kids over that. And that's exactly what they did. And so in the debate with the Republican and Democratic candidates, I called the ATF a bunch of murderers that they are for having done that.

And boy, did they not like that. I was a 20, 21-year-old kid that had seven or eight employees. My business was starting to take off. And I wound up being the only person in the entire world to be prosecuted for selling a firecracker on eBay, even though tons of other resellers were selling it. Cabela's Sporting Goods Catalog was selling it. These were being sold all over the place. I was literally the only person in the entire history of the world to be prosecuted for selling those without a permit.

And it wasn't about the fact that I sold them without a permit. It was they were mad about the things that I had said. And they even said as much in one of the discussions with my attorneys and the prosecutors and the ATF agents. The ATF agent literally at one point, he pounded his hand on the table and said, you didn't hear the things that he said, referring to me calling them murderers for litter. And if you burn to death a bunch of kids, you're a murderer. And that's exactly what they did.

And so I wound up actually signing a plea deal to do 10 months in federal prison. If I had taken it to trial and lost, which I would have because I was guilty of the laws written, I sold firecrackers without a license, I would have done seven or eight years in prison. And so at that point, I no longer felt safe in the U.S. I had been politically persecuted already. And so literally the day I was allowed to leave the U.S., I left.

But the way I became a libertarian, I wasn't born a libertarian. Somehow I found a book by Ludwig von Mises and then found some Milton Friedman and then later David Friedman. And then Murray Rothbard is the author that really changed my life and was just music to my ears recently hearing Millay down in Argentina talking about how Murray Rothbard was also one of the economists that influenced his life the most. And I want to urge anybody, pick up anything by Murray Rothbard. It'll change your entire view of the world. But in these books on economics, I learned about

the origin of money and how something comes to be used as money. And it has to be durable, easily divisible. It has to be portable. It has to be easily recognizable. It has to be difficult to counterfeit. It has to have these certain characteristics that make it usable as money. And so I read these economics books. I thought, okay, that makes sense. That sounds plausible.

But then when I went to federal prison, inside prison, everybody's using things as money. Everybody's buying and selling things with each other. And the things they're using are tobacco, postage stamps, and Top Ramen soups. And if you think about it, all those things have those characteristics. They're easily transportable. They're durable. They're easily recognizable. They all have some additional use case, right? You can mail a letter. You can eat the soup. You can smoke the tobacco. And all those things just naturally, without any order from a guard or any inmate or anybody, they just naturally come to be used as money.

And so then we fast forward more than a decade later there, Bitcoin came along. And I had the theoretical knowledge from the books that I had read, and I had the practical experience from my time in prison. There was no doubt in my mind whatsoever that people were going to start using Bitcoin as money. And so I thought, oh, this is every libertarian's dream come true. Suddenly now we're going to have a choice. And

I'm not against the US dollar or the yen or the euro. I'm pro-choice. I think people should be able to choose what form of money they want to use. And whether it's the dollar, the euro, the yen, or Bitcoin, or some other cryptocurrency out there, I think people deserve the right to have that choice. And I want to see that enabled. And so when Bitcoin came along, the first step was for me to buy a bunch of Bitcoin. I bought my first Bitcoin when they were less than a dollar each.

And then my business, MemoryDealers.com, became the first established business in the entire world to start accepting Bitcoin for payments. And we started advertising, we accept Bitcoin. Not a single customer paid us initially in Bitcoin, but it got worldwide media attention for the first time. And I remember...

It was in June of 2011. And in the course of two, maybe three weeks, the price of Bitcoin went from around $3 a Bitcoin to $30 a Bitcoin. And that was the first time in the history of Bitcoin up to that point in which it started to get some worldwide media attention. And what an interesting thing happened. So the main discussion forum where everybody up to that point was talking about Bitcoin was a website called bitcointalk.org. And suddenly when it was getting some media attention around the world and international newspapers,

this forum that had worked wonderfully up to that point where people could discuss things became flooded with bots, just posting comments that were just, you know, fluff and made literally they, they DDoS the forum to the point that it was unusable. And anybody that came there because they heard about Bitcoin in the media that week,

they weren't able to learn about it because there's just so many posts saying, you know, buy, sell, oh no, and just saying nothing of any substance whatsoever. So somebody out there literally made the forum unusable as early as 2011. And around that same time, we already know that the CIA was interested in Bitcoin because they're asking different Bitcoin developers to, hey, can you explain Bitcoin to us? So,

way back when the vast majority of the world hadn't even heard of Bitcoin yet. The CIA was looking into it and somebody was actively preventing it from spreading as quickly as it otherwise could have by shutting down the forum effectively when so many new people were coming to Bitcoin to learn about it for the first time.

And in the early days, everybody knew, though, Bitcoin was supposed to be money for the world. Bitcoin was supposed to be used for payments as peer-to-peer cash for the world. And that's how people were using it. And, you know, I was doing payroll on it and I was paying my suppliers overseas. I hosted the first Bitcoin meetup ever in China about it. Like, I was really doing my best to spread this all over the world, including, you know, paying for national radio ads for it. Like, it was really, really spreading worldwide.

But then later, in I believe 2012, a person using the name John Dillon, who claimed to work for intelligence,

spent more than ten thousand dollars i i forget the exact amount but a significant sum of money to start producing propaganda to trick people into thinking that by keeping the blocks on bitcoin small it would become make it more decentralized and literally the exact opposite of the truth the exact opposite of the way satoshi nakamoto the creator of bitcoin designed it and promoted it in the exact opposite of the way that people were using it and nobody believed the propaganda initially

But then later, this giant wave of censorship took place. Anonymous people that nobody knows their real names managed to get control of all the main discussion platforms for Bitcoin. And then suddenly, one day overnight, nobody was even allowed to advocate for Bitcoin being used as money. And they censored anybody that tried to do that. And initially, everybody saw through it. But then everybody that came to Bitcoin after the censorship began

They just started believing it. And today, the main people that are out there promoting Bitcoin, they literally say, oh, Bitcoin shouldn't compete with the US dollar. Bitcoin, you shouldn't use it as money. You shouldn't use it to pay for things. Like Bitcoin is just a digital asset. You should just hold it. And it's the exact opposite. Through the censorship and the propaganda, they've literally hijacked Bitcoin. And I literally wrote an entire book about it. You can find more at hijackingbitcoin.com. It's available on Amazon and everywhere else.

And lo and behold, just a couple of weeks after the book is published, I get arrested. And now I'm facing 109 years in federal prison for having exposed the way in which Bitcoin was hijacked. And you can think all day long that the new version of Bitcoin that people are promoting is better. OK, but you can't admit that it wasn't hijacked.

And luckily now we have thousands of different cryptocurrencies and I support competition, right? I'm not, I was never a Bitcoin maximalist or any other cryptocurrency maximalist. I'm a utilitarian freedom maximalist. Whatever gives the most utility and is the most useful for the most people around the world to improve their lives and create more economic freedom that leads to more economic growth. That's what I want to be out there and promote to the world. So a bunch of questions, but let's just begin with the core promise of Bitcoin, as we both remember vividly, was that I would be able to conduct

transactions by goods and services privately without federal control. That there was anonymity because it was digital. And I could sort of have freedom in the things that I bought. How exactly did they control conversation about that? You say that they censored the discussion boards. Can you explain exactly how that works?

So there were two main discussion platforms where everybody was talking about Bitcoin. And that one was called bitcointalk.org. And then another was rbitcoin on Reddit. And everybody was busy talking about Bitcoin in those places. And the same anonymous individual managed to get moderatorship position or ownership of both of those forums. And one day he decided to turn on the censorship and they would ban anybody that would state anything that wasn't in line with the small block propaganda about Bitcoin.

And when the censorship first began, people started a thread on Reddit complaining about the censorship. At that point, it was the most upvoted thread ever in the entire history of that Bitcoin subreddit. And what did they do? They then deleted that post as well and banned the people that were participating in that post. And the censorship still goes on to this very day. If you go on rbitcoin or bitcointalk.org and post anything in favor of Bitcoin being able to scale to be money for the world, they will ban your account.

And it's really, really a shame. So the average person that's involved in Bitcoin today, they just see, oh, the price is about $100,000 each. And Michael Saylor is talking about, you know, pay your taxes and don't be inflammatory. Don't compete with the U.S. dollar. That's going to make Visa and MasterCard and the government angry. Don't do any of that. He's saying literally the exact opposite of what everybody was saying in the beginning of Bitcoin, which is like this finally gives people a choice as to what form of money they were to use. And so imagine if everybody was using Bitcoin.

Bitcoin as money in commerce to do their payroll and buy things online and pay for everything. How would the US government be able to give billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine when most people don't want that to happen? How would they be able to spend billions and billions of dollars on all these foreign wars that most people don't want to be able to have happen? They wouldn't be able to just inflate it out of thin air. Suddenly, government would be much, much more accountable to the people. And they teach everybody in school,

oh government you know government works for the people well if people were using a hard asset cryptocurrency as money in everyday life government really would have to be much more accountable to the people than they are today and that's why government doesn't want that so that's why they've been doing everything they can to subvert bitcoin

and prevent people from being able to use cryptocurrencies as money in daily life, whether it's from tax policy or tax reporting or exit taxes or anything else. They're making it as difficult as possible. In fact, even the people that are in the studio here that we're recording this with, I offered to pay them in cryptocurrency. The reason they didn't want it is because they're scared of the tax ramifications around it because government's going to lose control

of the money supply. And if they lose control of the money supply, they lose control of most of their control of society. But if you believe in individual rights and individual freedom and people being in charge of their own destiny, it's a wonderful thing when government loses the ability to control people's lives. And that's why I'm so excited about Bitcoin. I've been involved almost 15 years. I've been promoting cryptocurrencies everywhere.

as currency for people worldwide, whether you're stuck in Spain awaiting extradition or in the U.S. or anywhere else on the planet, cryptocurrencies is for everybody. And they need to go head to head and compete with the U.S. dollar and the euro and the yen and the ruble and everything else. Because when people have more choices, their lives are better off and it results in more economic freedom. More economic freedom results in more economic growth and

More economic growth raises everybody's standard of living, which literally makes every single person's life on the planet better off. And that's why it's such an exciting thing for me to be involved in. And that's why I'm doing it despite risking 109 years in federal prison for just telling people about these amazing ideas and technologies. Now, we've told you before about a staff favorite here at TCN, the Eight Sleep Pod.

What is it? It's a high-tech mattress. We talk about over lunch here, our mattresses, because this one is excellent. It's high-tech. It's a cover. It goes right over your existing bed. Well, this Christmas, you can get it for the best price of the year, up to $600 off. The 8 Sleep Pod works by adjusting the temperature, warmer or cooler, depending on your preference, and it maintains an ideal sleeping network all night long.

you might not know this but through different phases of sleep every night your body's needs change sometimes you want it warmer sometimes colder that's why you throw the sheets off that's why you pull them around you other parts of the night you don't have to do that anymore with eight sleep because it automatically keeps things exactly where you want them throughout your entire night's sleep what's called the sleep cycle

And it's been studied, it's clinically proven to increase quality sleep time every night that improves your recovery time from physical exertion, makes you a little sharper, makes your health better. It learns and adapts to your sleep patterns over time and then automatically adjust temperatures throughout the night through each phase of your sleep. And it does this independently for up to two people in a bed. So each person can have a tailor-made sleep pattern.

It really helps. People here absolutely love it. 8sleep. Go to 8sleep.com slash Tucker. Use the promo code Tucker to get up to 600 bucks off the pod for Ultra. You can try it with no obligation for 30 days. If you don't like it, just send it back.

That's 8sleep.com slash Tucker. Better sleep, truly. Strong families are built on strong foundations, and it all begins with what you bring into your home. It's hard, though, because big pharma and the processed food industry have spent decades putting you and your loved ones at risk, pushing toxic, harmful products that make you sick, that have made our country sick. It's not a guess. That's happened. So it's well past time that someone decided to help you fight back. Public Square is doing that.

Public Square is the leading family marketplace where you will find clean, healthy products sourced from American small businesses that actually share your values. With Christmas right around the corner, now is the time to abandon the corporate food conglomerates in favor of something better, healthier, more pure. Make the switch. Stock your home with the quality essentials and shop for gifts your whole family will love. And it's easy. PublicSquare.com slash Tucker. And you can get started. PublicSquare.com slash Tucker.

Don Jr. here, guys. Are you receiving letters from the IRS claiming you owe back taxes? As penalties and interest fees pile up, the IRS gives you no clear path to resolution. Don't speak to them on your own. They are not your friends. To reach a team of licensed tax professionals that can help you reduce, settle, and resolve your tax matters, go to TNUSA.com and check them out. Solve your tax problems today. Call 1-800-780-8888.

or visit TNUSA.com. That's 1-800-780-8888. At a public urinal, it just feels like you're standing there too long. What used to seem like a high-pressure hose filling a bucket, now it's more like a trickle. You notice a weaker flow, an urge to urinate more often, sleep is interrupted by multiple trips to the bathroom, and it has steadily gotten worse. You didn't think about going to a doctor for

They may call it enlarged prostate or BPH. I mean, no one talks about this. We're supposed to suck it up, right? That's what we do. But we know we need to do something or life is going to be different. But what can you do about enlarged prostate? The good news? There is a minimally invasive procedure covered by most insurance called the Urolift system. Men 45 and older go to helpbphnow.com to find a Urolift system trained doctor near you. Most common side effects are temporary and can include discomfort when urinating.

Tucker says it best. The credit card companies are ripping Americans off and enough is enough.

This is Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas. Our legislation, the Credit Card Competition Act, would help end the grip Visa and MasterCard have on us. Every time you use your credit card, they charge you a hidden fee called a swipe fee, and they've been raising it without even telling you. This hurts consumers and every small business owner. In fact, American families are paying $1,100 in hidden swipe fees each year.

The fees Visa and MasterCard charge Americans are the highest in the world, double candidates and eight times more than Europe's. That's why I've taken action, but I need your help to help get this passed. I'm asking you to call your senator today and demand they pass the Credit Card Competition Act. Paid for by the Merchants Payments Coalition. Not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.

So the original promise was Bitcoin will make you free, and then it became quickly through subversion, Bitcoin will make you rich. And that was enough to kind of derail the promise. I should note that you are rich from Bitcoin. I mean, and you could very easily kind of not say anything and just be happily rich with Bitcoin because you bought a lot of it early. And so it sounds like your ideological commitment is overriding your financial interests.

It's not even close for me. So I was a multimillionaire before Bitcoin had ever even been invented. I had my own tech companies in Silicon Valley that had done very well for me. Lots of people talk about, oh, win Lambo and I'm going to sell my Bitcoin and buy a Lambo. I had had multiple Lamborghinis before Bitcoin had ever even been invented.

When Bitcoin came along, I was such a big believer in Bitcoin that I sold my Lamborghini to buy more Bitcoin. That's how excited I was about this philosophically and emotionally and intellectually, because this is literally one of the best tools the world has ever seen to give individuals more control over their own lives. And so I was headed in the exact opposite direction of most of the people that are involved in Bitcoin today. I was selling things to buy more Bitcoin because I knew this was going to become money for the world. And today, it may

Maybe it'll be Bitcoin. Maybe it'll be a different cryptocurrency. But cryptocurrencies are still certainly the way of the future. And remember, today is 2024. When Bitcoin first came out, there was no Apple Pay. There was no Zelle. There was barely any of this thing. There was almost no competition. But government successfully delayed the adoption of cryptocurrencies so that now suddenly the traditional financial systems had a chance to catch up and get a lot more done and grow.

And it's just really, really frustrating because life is short. As anybody, you know, as each year goes by, they go by faster and faster. And there's less and less of each of our lifespans left. We need the benefits brought by cryptocurrency as soon as possible. And we know all the benefits for the world as soon as possible. Like, let's not waste time. That's exactly what governments around the world have been doing. They've been delaying and hindering the adoption of cryptocurrency as money, which is literally delaying the progress of all of humankind and all of human society. And it's really frustrating to see that happen.

The most frustrating part from my perspective is the inability to use cryptocurrency, apparently, with any privacy. I mean, that is the core promise. I earned the money, didn't do anything wrong, and I would like to buy something that's sort of no one's business, whether I'm buying it or not. And I would like to do that in privacy. I don't think that's a weird thing to want. It's a human thing to want. And is that possible?

That's my question. Is it now possible to conduct any kind of business with crypto anonymously? So in the early days, everybody thought Bitcoin was basically anonymous and people treated it that way. And then websites came up that were selling things that governments might not necessarily want you to buy. And people were using Bitcoin for that because they thought it was basically anonymous. And then later on, we found out that it wasn't

anonymous at all but additional steps were taken to make bitcoin even less anonymous and today most people are just using custodial wallets which are you know it's not even a wallet it's just an account and it's no more private than your you know bank of america or paypal account in fact it's even less private than those things because anybody can take a look at the blockchain and see what's there but luckily there's other cryptocurrencies out there that do give people more privacy so there's things like monero which most people are now using uh if they want some privacy

But there's even more exciting technologies and coins out there. There's another one called Zeno that allows anybody to create their own privacy token in which nobody can see what's going on. And if you really want to get the three-letter agencies upset or governments upset, there's a project called Confidential Layer, which is creating a bridge from Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum onto Zeno. So you can take Bitcoin with no privacy at all or Ethereum with no privacy at all and bridge it permissionlessly with no custodian and no central point of attack.

onto Zeno. And when it's on Zeno, you have very, very strong privacy with that as well. And so I think that's going to make a whole lot more privacy come to the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. But governments are going to hate that. Like Monero that I mentioned before, it's preemptively banned from being listed on most exchanges in most of the world at this point. And that's simply because governments have much less of an ability to spy on people that are using things like Monero or Zeno. And that's why I'm a big fan of things like Monero or Zeno today.

But in fact, today, I would be embarrassed to promote. I am embarrassed to promote Bitcoin to people today because the transactions are slow, expensive, unreliable, and you have no privacy. I'd be proud to promote something like a Monero or a Zeno or a Zcash or a Zcoin or any of these privacy tools out there.

Because those are the ones that provide more individual control to people and more privacy and more economic freedom to people over the world. People are claiming that Bitcoin is freedom money, but I'm really afraid that they're literally building the financial prison walls around themselves. Like if you look at what's going on in El Salvador, everybody's excited about Bitcoin there, but they're all using custodial accounts that the government can see automatically.

every single transaction you're making, and they can freeze your account at any time. That's the exact opposite of economic freedom. That's economic government control. And so anybody that's paying attention should be really, really concerned about this. And they should be advocating the use of cryptocurrencies in which individuals can actually have control of their own money and have control over their own lives, their own destiny. And

i maybe that'll be bitcoin thanks to this new technology called confidential layer that bridges it onto xeno but uh and i don't know what it's going to be but like we need to be really really careful because you know it could wind up that we've before we know it before we realize that we've built the financial prison walls around us and it's too late to get out and too late to escape so let's uh let's be aware of this today and uh and and you know watch out

A lot of people in the crypto world, I think, are admirable people. I'm friends with some of them. One you mentioned, actually, people I like and admire and largely agree with. But I'm a little bit confused as to why you're the only person I've ever heard say what you just said. Why aren't the people promoting various cryptocurrencies admirable?

Also sounding the alarm that none of the transactions you conduct using these currencies are private. In fact, they're very easily trackable by government. Why is nobody saying that? Because the censorship and propaganda works. Lots of people are saying that, but very few people other than myself have a big enough platform or a loud enough voice to get much attention. And because I had such a big platform and big voice, boom, suddenly I'm looking at 109 years in prison. I don't think that's a coincidence at all. And again, if...

The solution to ideas or people saying things that you don't agree with is more debate and more discussion and more free speech. Whereas most of the people promoting Bitcoin at this point, they've taken the exact opposite. They've been supporting the propaganda and the censorship, which I'm on the exact opposite. In fact, initially when the debate started happening as to what should be the proper scaling method for Bitcoin,

My heart was already on what was called the big block side, but I wanted to be open to the other arguments, and so I was just quiet and started listening. As I tried to listen,

Suddenly, one side started to try and censor the other side. And I already knew I was on the side of free speech. So as soon as one side tried to censor the other side, I knew, okay, it's time for me to speak up now. I'm on the side of free speech and I'm on the side of Bitcoin being able to scale in the original way that the Bitcoin white paper described as peer-to-peer cash for the entire world. That's very different than just the speculative asset. Everyone today is excited. Bitcoin's about almost $100,000.

maybe it would have been a hundred thousand dollars half a decade ago if it hadn't been hijacked and hadn't been destroyed in its usefulness, Ashcast for the world. So, uh, you need to look at what's seen and what's not seen and what we see today. Okay. It's close to a hundred thousand dollars. What's not seen is what it could have been if companies like Microsoft and Expedia and these other big companies around the world didn't have to stop accepting Bitcoin because of its slow transaction fees, uh, slow transaction times and unreliable transactions and lack of privacy as well. So it's, uh, really, uh, disappointing, but, uh,

Thank you for giving me a platform to help sound the alarm because I don't want to see the entire world wind up imprisoning themselves inside of some sort of a financial prison that they're building, even if it has a cool sounding name like Bitcoin. Who is Satoshi?

I don't know. And if anybody knows, I'm not aware of that. But whoever he is or wherever he is, he literally invented one of the most important things in the entire history of humankind up there on par with how important the invention of electricity or the transistor or the internet was. It really is one of the most world-changing technologies ever. And so whoever he is, wherever he is, or they are, or she is, they deserve their privacy because clearly that's what they want.

So it doesn't sound like you're suspicious that Bitcoin was created by the intel agencies as a way, as a kind of trap for people. I don't think it was created that way initially, but I am suspicious. And I do think that the intel agencies and other groups have converted it and hijacked it into becoming a financial trap. I just want to apologize, by the way, we were, or I was laughing off camera saying, you're such, you're so great at explaining this. No wonder they want to put you in prison. I shouldn't have laughed.

at that is sort of an awful thing to say because they actually are trying to put you in prison. And so rather than making fun of something so awful, I would love to know if you think you're actually going to go to prison. Is there any way to stop this? Yeah, there's a lot of ways to stop this, but the most useful way I think is to get the public to speak out, right? Like the more people that speak out, the safer all of us can be. And so one of the most egregious things here too is like,

the IRS with guns on their hip, they literally showed up at my attorney's office and my accountant's office. They raided my attorney's office, right? You're not supposed to be able to do that in the US. You're supposed to be able to talk to your attorneys and that's supposed to be private. And so all the information is available over at a website that supporters set up at freerojernow.org. They recently filed what's called a motion to dismiss where you can literally see with your own eyes

The US government is literally lying in their indictment and the proof is up there with the emails between myself and my attorneys. You can go and see. Please go take a look at it. Don't take my word for it. Take a look at that motion to dismiss.

They're lying. They're lying to the court in Spain. They're just lying every which way because they don't want the world to know the truth about cryptocurrencies that they can be used to empower individuals to have control of their own lives beyond the control of politicians who have never met you and they don't know about you in your life. And most of them don't care about you one bit. So like the fact that now people anywhere on the planet have access to money that they can use to escape inflation or they can use it to escape other, you know, oppressionary tactics, uh,

Cryptocurrency is an amazing, amazing tool for freedom around the world. And governments are the opposite of freedom. They don't like people having more freedom and that's why they don't like cryptocurrency and that's why they're trying to shut me up.

I wish I had even more hard proof, but I don't think it's a coincidence. They arrested me as soon as my book came out, and I was about to go on a big media tour promoting the fact that Bitcoin has been hijacked. And suddenly they have me arrested and tossed into jail for a month in Barcelona, and they were furious that I got out on bail. But this is the first media interview I've done since I've been out. I've been out over six months now. This is a really, really big deal for the entire world. This isn't just an American thing. This is literally...

affects every single person on the planet. So like another example of that is Apple. People all over the world use iPhones. Apple is an American company.

But it affects every single person on the planet. Every year, new Apple products come out. People all over the planet that aren't Americans also get to benefit from it. Americans get to benefit from it. Everybody gets to benefit from it. It's the same with cryptocurrencies. Everybody on the planet, even if it's somebody working on it in the U.S. or Spain or somewhere else, everybody on the planet gets to benefit from it. And by benefit from it, I mean they get to have more control over their own lives, their own finances, their own financial sovereignty.

Governments hate that. That's why they're trying to stop it. And that's why they don't want you to read hijacking Bitcoin. So you can hear with citations for everything how Bitcoin was hijacked and people are promoting it today is literally the exact opposite of what it started out as. Do you remember when Democrats used to refer to abortion as something that should be safe, legal and rare? Well, they've changed their view on that. It went from a right to a sacrament. This isn't the pro-choice movement you may remember from 30 years ago. This is something much darker.

And that's why we have joined forces with Preborn, they're a sponsor of the show and of our speaking tour, to do something about it. It's the largest pro-life organization in the United States. And they are doing what they should do, which is speaking up against this atrocity, killing babies after birth.

No one seems to have the bravery to call that wrong, which it is, but Preborn is calling it out. Their networks of clinics are positioned in the highest abortion areas in the country, and they've rescued 300,000 babies. When a woman considering an abortion searches to end her baby's life, Preborn is there. The power of ultrasound combined with the love of God doubles the baby's chance of being born. A single ultrasound costs 28 bucks. Five ultrasounds are 140 bucks.

giving women the information they need to make the decision that many of them actually want to make, to have a baby. Any gift will help, and all gifts are tax-deductible. To donate securely, go to preborn.com slash tucker or call pound 250 on your phone, and when asked, use the word baby. So is Christmas really about buying stuff? You'll be forgiven if you assumed it is because that's the message you receive.

But most people sense deep down there may be a little bit more to Christmas. Maybe this is the time of year to focus on growing your relationship with God, to remember there is a God and reach out to that God.

Well, to do that, you can check out Hallow, the Hallow app, and it's Advent Pray 25 Challenge. Hallow is the world's number one prayer and meditation app, and for good reason. It's amazing. It's fantastic. We use it. We're proud to use it. This Advent, we highly recommend you join Hallow's Prayer Challenge for God So Loved the World. Boy, that'll put meaning in your Christmas for sure. You've got spiritual stories, reflections, musics, testimonies. It's

It's really well done. You're not going to get it anywhere else in as easy a form. Just go to Hallow, download it, and bam, it's right there. So this is an opportunity to be transformed by God this Christmas. Don't wait. Get there. Three free months right now when you sign up at hallow.com slash Tucker. My wife comes home and tells me all about it every day. Spend this Christmas working on something that matters, your relationship with God. Maybe the only thing that matters. We hope you will. Hallow.

So here's a question you shouldn't have to think about, but probably do. What would you do if your family needed life-saving medication and you couldn't get any? You hate to think you're going to face that. We depend on our supply chains all the way from Asia to here, thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean. But let's be honest, that chain is fragile. Just one weather event, one container ship accident, an unexpected crisis, a war on the brink of a couple, and suddenly you can't get the medication that you need, that your family needs.

Now, people are going to tell you, don't worry about it. Calm down. Everything is fine. All right. But why not spend a little bit of money to make sure everything actually will be fine? And that's where the Jace case comes in. J-A-S-E case. It's not paranoid. It's planning. The Jace case is a simple portable supply of emergency medications, ones you actually will need, that you can keep at home so you're totally prepared.

It's better to be too early than too late, though at this point, nobody thinks we're going to be too early with this. Check it out for yourself. Go to Jace.com, J-A-S-E.com, and use the code Tucker for a discount. That's Jace.com, promo code Tucker. You should do it. We have. I'm a little bit surprised that the government of Spain is honoring the extradition request. I mean, the U.S. government just sent $100 billion to Ukraine without an audit.

to the most corrupt country in Europe, $100 billion, didn't even bother to audit it. You know, and a huge percentage is being stolen. We know that. They don't care. So the idea that the U.S. government is so upset that you, a non-citizen, didn't pay U.S. taxes, which you're not even obligated to pay, is like absurd on its face. How did the Spanish government participate in what's obviously a grotesque miscarriage of justice? Why would they play along with that? If I can interject, not only are they mad about the

the taxes. I wasn't an American and I wasn't living in the U.S., right? This is like, it's so crazy. I was not American, not living in the U.S. and they're claiming I owe them more U.S. taxes on the Bitcoin. Like it's just absolute insanity. But if you look at it, when there's a political persecution, they just have to make stuff up so they can grab the people. And the most common way they do it is they use the government tax code because it's so incredibly complicated. Even people that want to comply with every last little detail and how the best professionals like I did myself,

It's too complicated. They can get you if they want you, and that's what they do time and time again. And so in regards to the Spanish government, I have an amazing attorney here, Jaime Campanier. I'm really hoping that he's going to be successful here. He's optimistic about the whole situation, but you don't know. And it's a really terrifying way to live day to day.

If I win and Spain decides not to extradite me, they'll send me or my attorney a letter and say, congratulations, you're not being extradited. If I lose and they decide to extradite me, they don't tell me in advance. They'll just be a knock at my door one morning and they'll grab me and they'll put me in jail and I'll

I'll have zero notice whatsoever. I won't be able to return the rental car or tell the landlord or anything else. They'll literally just come to my house, grab me one morning, and I won't know in advance which morning it's going to be. It'll just happen one morning. And so it's not a fun way to live day to day, knowing if this is your last day, you know, not in prison potentially for the rest of your entire life. And so, but I'm cautiously optimistic that Spain will be able to see through this and see that what a politically motivated persecution this is.

by a bunch of people that are just jealous. If I hadn't been treated so unfairly politically the last time around when I ran for political office and tried to change the system within, I'd still be a proud, flag-waving American today. And the values of my heart are still some of the most American values there are. And if you think about it, people say, oh, you renounced your U.S. citizenship. That's not very patriotic. Are you kidding? That's exactly the values that America was founded on. It was a bunch of British people that renounced their citizenship and said—

I don't like laws you guys are passing. I'm not going to be a part of this anymore. So renouncing your citizenship is actually one of the most patriotic American-esque things you can possibly do. And I hope the Spanish government will be able to see. Like, I've been out there, you know, speaking out to the world about the benefits of cryptocurrency. The U.S. government has the most to lose because the dollar is the world reserve currency, so they like it less than even other governments. This is clearly a politically motivated persecution and...

my my uh my faith and hope and and you know my my dreams are with the spanish government to not extradite me at this point and i hope they do the right thing and they can see what's going on but uh

I also, you know, have maybe I can beat the whole thing at trial as well. But, you know, you never know. You're rolling the dice there, even though I'm completely innocent. But we also could have the Department of Justice and IRS just drop all the charges because it's completely I'm completely innocent. And we literally fought this thing all the way to the Supreme Court in regards to my attorney client privilege documents.

When they finally got access to those documents, they were probably mad because it was me literally telling my attorneys, do everything perfectly. Do everything perfectly. I don't want to have any problems. And so they had a big, giant letdown. So there was a Supreme Court case in regards to myself. People need to understand how insane it is that the IRS raided my tax attorney's

their office. How can you raid someone's attorney's office to violate attorney-client privilege in the U.S.? That's the stuff that all the U.S. propaganda wants you to believe goes on in Russia all the time and other countries, but they're doing it right there at home where I was born and raised in the United States of America. It's insane that that's going on. So,

President Biden can do the right thing. He just recently, you know, pardoned his son. He can issue a preemptive pardon for me. Trump, when he gets into office, if anybody knows what it's like to be the victim of lawfare, it's Trump. So I think he'll be able to see it in this case as well. He can issue a preemptive pardon for me as well and a bunch of other people.

that deserve it. I'm not the only one, right? There's a whole long list of people out there that have been the victim of lawfare. And more often than not, it's people that are engaged in something that the U.S. doesn't like politically. And if you rock the boat and the state doesn't like it, they're going to come after you. And I'm just one more on that long, long, long list of people that they've attacked and trying to destroy their lives.

If I wasn't in this business, I wouldn't believe any of this. I wouldn't think anything you were saying was true. I've just seen it so often. Just a specific point. Are you allowed to leave Spain or are you imprisoned by Spain? Can you leave the country? So, no, not only can I not leave the country, I'm on an island in Spain, off the coast of Spain called Mallorca.

I'm not even allowed to leave this island. I'm not allowed to go on a boat. I'm not allowed to do anything. And every 48 hours, I have to check in with the court and show them my ID and prove that I didn't run away. And again, any day could be my last year. If they decide they are going to extradite me, they'll just show up unannounced and arrest me here in Spain and put me back in the Spanish prison and then at some point ship me to the U.S. prison as well. And so that's like a pretty nerve-wracking way to live day after day here in Spain. So Spain's a wonderful country, but I would love to be here voluntarily.

What it's it's shocking that Spain can act as the jailers for the U.S. government on transparently fake charges. What's you already spent a month in Spanish prison. What was that like? My Spanish is certainly better than it was before that. You know, prison slang. Yeah. And actually, because I'm such a clean cut, well-spoken guy.

There were a couple of other people in the prison started to think I must be some sort of an American undercover spy spying on the prison. So like some of the other inmates were really wary of me and didn't want to speak to me. And luckily nobody, you know, found out who I was or what my role was in regards to cryptocurrency.

But some people were awfully suspicious of me and I was very glad to get out when I finally did. And the US government was very angry that they granted me bail here in Spain. They wanted to hold me in jail in Spain the entire time in a country, you know, I think this was only the second time I'd ever even visited Spain ever. I thought I was only going to be here for four days. There was a cryptocurrency conference about privacy cryptocurrencies here, about Zeno and Monero and things like that. I thought I was just going to be here for that. And I was in the hotel lobby.

after the conference and some guy I didn't know came up to me with a thick Spanish accent and said, are you Roger Ver? And I said, yes. And Roger Ver? Yes. And like three or four times back and forth. And when I finally convinced him that I was Roger Ver and that we had overcome the language barrier, and I thought he was a crypto guy. I wanted to ask for like a, you know, autograph copy of my book or talk about crypto or something. Then he pulled out his badge and said that he has an Interpol arrest warrant. And they arrested me right there in the, in the lobby of the hotel in Barcelona and, and, you know, hauled me off to jail in Spain. And, uh,

Boy, was I not expecting that one bit to happen and talk about having your world turned upside down. But it just makes me even more motivated because cryptocurrencies are such a powerful, powerful tool for every human being on the planet. How could I not be quiet about spreading this good message to everybody around the world? So congratulations, America. You made me even more motivated to spread cryptocurrency adoption to the world. That is just one of the craziest stories I think I've ever heard.

Roger, Godspeed. We are just rooting for you fervently, and I hope this helps in some small way. Anyway, you're in our thoughts. Thank you. My pleasure, Tucker. And if I can ask people that want to show their support, please head over to freerogernow.org, and I would deeply appreciate that. Thank you. Good luck.

Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to TuckerCarlson.com to see everything that we have made. The complete library. TuckerCarlson.com.